New Year's Eve Is Exhausting

For $799, you can spend New Years in a midtown Ruby Tuesday. That’s the price of the “Private Couple’s VIP” package at the chain restaurant's Times Square location, a package that includes two hours of passed appetizers, a five-hour open bar, and a private table for two. It does not include an actual view of the ball drop, nor does it include coat check (that’s $5-$10 extra). For a steal of $179, you can get all that without the reserved seating, instead allowing you to pack in to watch a live broadcast of the ball drop with hundreds of your closest strangers, who have all recently housed who knows how many BBQ meatballs.

This probably does not sound like your New Year's, but it might be closer than you think. Because New Year's Eve is one of those nights that courts plans, whether it’s paying too much cover at a crowded bar or inviting 40 people to a house party. And while plans are great, there’s a different texture to plans made in anticipation of it being the best night ever, which is always the subtext of a massive New Year's bash. It’s not just that you’re getting your friends together to mark the passing of the year; you’re doing so with the intent of it being wild and memorable. Which, frankly, is exhausting.

New Year's Eve isn’t the only version of this kind of planning. There are 21st birthdays, friends in town for one night, a favorite band on tour—they all inspire the sort of breathless, electric energy at the beginning of the night that winds up being impossible to live up to. Everyone gets together and declares that this is going to be “epic” and “the best night of our lives,” and as the night goes on, repeats those phrases with increased anxiety, more of a question than a statement, too committed to break the spell. At some point you look around at everyone having fun—normal fun, not epic fun—and wonder why your incantation didn’t work. Why isn’t something so ridiculous we’ll laugh at it for years to come happening? Why is this, at best, enjoyable?

Occasion calls for a change of norms, so it’s natural that celebrating a new year would inspire us to try new things, or celebrate in ways that are a little extra. But New Year's Eve is a good reminder that those once-in-a-blue-moon nights that you and your friends will talk about for years to come can’t really be manufactured.

Think of the last time that happened. For me, it started with grabbing a drink with friends after a reading we had all gone to, and ended with me at a taping of the Chris Gethard show. It was not a holiday, and none of this was planned, and it was, in more ways than one, intoxicating. So I get it. If I could manufacture nights like that all the time, when you look around and ask yourself how you got to be in this amazing place in this amazing time and thank every single path you’ve taken because it’s all landed you here, I would have them every night. But what makes those times special is precisely the unpredictability of them. It’s risk and reward, and planning on having a wild night requires no risk.

This is not to say New Year's Eve plans have to suck, or that any planned night of fun is a bore. Just that maybe, you’ll have a better time if the pressure is off. New Year's Eve doesn’t have to be the wildest night of the year. It can just be fun, plain fun. Then again, locking yourself in a fast-casual chain for seven hours seems a fitting homage to 2018, so go nuts.

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